Tag: david sparks

About eight years ago, in November of 2008, I started my first attempt at NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I failed miserably, only putting down a few thousand words … but those few thousand words were the start of something … something that stuck around in my head for years while I tried to figure the whole story out. Over the last year or two I’ve been back at the story, getting those ideas down to paper – trying to get the entire complicated thing into one story that made sense….

If you’ve been following me on social media, you’ve probably seen me posting a lot of updates recently about all the progress I’m making on my next novel, ‘The Unfortunate Expiration of One Mr. David S. Sparks.’ The goal is to have this first draft done by the end of October, so I’ve been cranking through the rough draft and putting down a lot of words to meet my self-imposed deadline. As I’ve mentioned before, I do a lot of my writing to music. It helps me to set the…

Last month marked my first time taking part in Camp NaNoWrimo. I set a goal to write 35,000 words in my current work-in-progress, but failed pretty miserably – coming in at about 10,000 words total written through the month. Part of it could be blamed on the fact that it’s summer, and there are responsibilities and vacations etc, but even when I did sit down to write, I tended to write considerably less than I had planned to in those sessions. Now, a few weeks into August, I’m back at it…

As I prepare to write the next section of my new novel, I’m finding myself needing to do quite a bit of additional location research. I mentioned the other day that I was in Chicago to get a better idea of the setting for this next part, and while I was down there I took quite a bunch of photos. My main character is going to be basically traveling from the Shedd Aquarium to the near west side of Chicago, via Roosevelt – on foot. I’d already spent some time on Google…

One thing I do while writing that tends to help spur creativity and get me into the proper state of mind for a project is to spend time trying out different cover concepts. The whole process of trying to accomplish the proper aesthetic helps me to better understand the feel I’m trying to bring across in the written product. As mentioned previously, I’m currently working on a fairly ambitious speculative futurist/sci-fi book that I’m calling ‘The Unfortunate Expiration of Mr. David S. Sparks’ (although as you’ll see below, sometimes it’s…

Now that ‘A Confession’ is out, I’m back at work on my highly ambitious speculative sci-fi project that I’ve been working on off and on since 2008. The first draft, which is quite a ways from complete, is already longer than ‘A Confession’ and almost as long as ‘The Trouble With Being God’ – and it’s many levels more complex than either of those were. The reasons for the complexity are going to stay under wraps for now, but I can say that it’s a piece of cautionary speculative futurist…